The day so far has been perfectly lovely. Yesterday and all last night it rained, heavily at times. It was still raining at four so I don’t know when it stopped. Everything is damp, except the air. It is dry and only 73˚. The sun has a sharpness, and the cool breeze sways small branches and leaves. The dogs are in and out. I can hear them chasing each other in the yard. I can hear their growls as they chew each other. I’ve opened all the windows to freshen the house.

My friend Bill sent out an article about 60 years of Peace Corps. The article said, “Peace Corps embraces cultural understanding…” I remember from the start we learned languages to use every day. We asked no more than anyone else. We became part of the community as teachers who taught at the training college. I was madam as all female teachers were. We did our best.

Bill wrote a note with the article saying he knows he talks a lot about Ghana and Peace Corps, but they had a profound influence on the rest of his life, on who he became. I know exactly what he means. I think most returned volunteers feel the same way. When I went back to Ghana for the first time in forty years, Accra had become a city of note, a sprawling city with neighborhoods, only a few of which I remembered. Adabraca was where the Peace Corps hostel was. We just told any taxi driver Adabraca, and he’d take us to the hostel. Where else would young and white go? One taxi driver told me he hated Peace Corps because we knew the right price. I didn’t find any of the old Accra Peace Corps haunts like Tala’s (I don’t know about the spelling), a wonderful Lebanese restaurant. We’d get a huge plate of hummus, on a flat plate, more like a round of hummus. In the middle, the hummus had sesame oil and around the top circle of the plate was a round of hot pepper. You dipped pita bread, one into the other. It is still my favorite way to eat hummus. We’d get what Talal called a Peace Corps pizza, a round of pita bread with cheese and chopped tomato inside. The bread was fried so the cheese melted. It was really good.

I apologize for the tangent. That happens. Anyway my Peace Corps experience also influenced the rest of my life, the choices I made. I wasn’t always happy, but I mostly was. When Bill, Peg and I found each other again, I wasn’t even surprised that we remembered so much of each other. I wasn’t at all surprised we shared the same politics. We still liked each other a whole lot. We had some wonderful experiences. I still laugh about the sacred rock and the river in Philadelphia.

I too will often write about Ghana. As with Bill and Peg, my experiences influenced the rest of my life and have become ingrained in who I am. For that, I am very thankful. I am also very thankful to you, my Coffee family, who indulges my memories.

This entry was posted on September 10, 2021 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: fall day, Ghana, Peace Corps, sharpness of the sunlight